You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Get Good at Anything

Episode Date: June 24, 2020

Today, Peter and Adam give you some helpful tips on what it takes to build new skills.Today's episode is sponsored by Anytune. Anytune is the perfect tool for anyone looking to improve their practice sessions. Learn, transcribe, and practice solos by slowing down the tempo, adjusting the pitch, and (for Pro+ users), isolating specific instruments in the mix. For more info, follow this link.Upcoming Open Studio Live Events (All times in EDT):Today & tomorrow at 1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)Thursday 6/25 @ 4:00 PM - Peter and Adam host their Piano Office Hours (for Members Only)For the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkInterested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Adam. What's up? How do you get good at stuff? Well, it's a complicated process. Here, if you reference my blackboard, you see I have an equation that starts out with the Pythagrium theorem. And then we're going to work that into our daily Google calendar that I've shared with you, our co-founder, and my parents. Now, if we run that through the spectrometer, what we get... I don't really know. I'm Adam Mace. I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear Podcast. Music advice coming at you.

Coming at you today, again, from the pod hall. The pod hall. It's what I'm calling it. You feel it. Feel the pod hall. So we've had, actually, you know what's ironic about this, Peter? I don't know if you realize this. This is pretty much where we started the podcast.

It is. We've gone full circle as it were, as you would. Yeah, we started off in the big pod hall with the original maybe, I don't know, 100 you'll hear it. And then we were like, we got to build. That many? It might have been a lot, man. Yeah.

And then we were like, we got to build a cave for this. And so we did. We built the pod cave where we took some fake sound walls and built a little pod cave. And then pre-pandemic, we built the pod suite. Right. Which was sweet. It was sweet. It was a little bigger.

Yeah. Still not pandemic size, which we didn't, we didn't even, we couldn't even spell pandemic at that time. We could not. No. Yeah. So we were in the pod suite up until the beginning. I mean, you remember when we had dismantled, you know, the pod suite when all that this. second week of March or whatever. Oh yeah. I know I came in like a thief in the night. I took everything

I couldn't fit. I know I had to come separate you know. Yeah the Grand Center Security was like side-eyeing me as I was going to my car. Those were weird couple days but yeah we set up separately in our homes you know whatever five miles apart and I think did some pretty good episodes remotely we learned we went through some different random systems we did it on Instagram live for a while we did it on Zoom I think became our kind of thing. Yeah we've been doing some solo ones too which we might hang on to some solo ones. Those are fun. Solo ones are good. We got some nice feedback. But yeah, we just, and you know, the listenership, we've been doing so many lives, of course, and it's been great to meet a lot of you guys of our, you'll hear at listeners in the various lives. That's

been a really fun thing. And we're back here with a, we're at a long, this is just our first day back. We're not back in the studio. We're just back here to record it. We've got a big long table between us, nice social distance. We can hear each other, but we can see each other. Kind of, yeah, yeah. But we just, you know, we just want to say, look, we, This is not like, oh, pandemic's over. Let's jump back in the water in the Ozarks, dude. We're not doing that. We're doing this very responsibly, and we just want to say that, you know.

They're doing that like 200 miles from here. That's true. That's true. They're being irresponsible. No, but we just want to send great thoughts out to everybody. I know that everybody's, you know, been cooped up and stuff as, as have we. But we want to send out good thoughts and healing to a lot of people. There's still a lot of people getting sick.

You know, this thing is like, for real. And we want to be a little bit of a respite. a little bit of a diversion, have a little bit of fun, learn a little something. Yeah. A little edutainment as we've thrown around, but we want to also not make light of the very serious situation that we're in here due the pandemic and also just due to the awareness of the police brutality and injustices, injustice is for real against folks of color. You know, we've been talking about that and we we don't want to, we never want to

just, you know, pass over that as we talk about these other things. No, man. All of that super, super important. Yeah, but it's good to be back with you here, Pete. It's nice to be in person here. Before we get too deep into this, today's episode is sponsored by Enitune. Go to anytune.us slash you'll hear it to check out what is what we consider to be one of the best tools you can have. Yeah.

To learn jazz from records, which is, you know, you'll hear it. That's what this podcast is all about. Also, the AnyTune team is close to the AnyTune on Android private beta. Sign up at AnyTune. app slash Android if you're an Android user to check out the new beta of AnyTune on Android. I have it on my iPhone. It's amazing.

And they've been getting to this Android app for a while, though I'm so excited that's finally going to be out. So if you're an Android user and you want to transcribe some sick works, hit out again Anytune.app slash Android. And I have no doubt at all that the Android app is going to be

spectacular. They are so purposeful and thoughtful in their software design and the good folks at AnyTune. The only thing I got to say about any tune. I love the app. I love the Mac program. The Mac app is next level with the ability to just very quickly. I hate to say it. I use it to get rid of the piano often and play along. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Is that bad? No, that's great, man. Yeah, basically you can filter out the piano. Well, you can filter out any instrument. And it works surprisingly good. I did it on, shocking. I was doing it on Herbie's taken off

six or seven months ago, maybe I think, up here, actually, here in the studio. And I did not sound as good as Herbie Hancock. I was a little disappointed, so maybe fix that. Can you fix that in A-Tune for me? But yeah, it filters out, and then you have play-along tracks where you can be Herbie, you can be Adam Manus. You could get a 4-42's record and take off Adam Manus. But I mean, it's a really cool thing.

The only thing, I don't know if I've told you this, Adam, I'm a little salty at the AnyTune folks. I know normally when a company is sponsoring you, you're not supposed to speak ill of them. What you got? Well, okay, I love this tool, but I have to say that I'm still learning, but I'm not exactly in my formative years, like young teenage Peter was.

If young teenage Peter or even preteen had this app, I would be Harvey Hancock right now. I really feel that way. Like, I was looking for this app before it existed. Yeah, I don't think this app was possible in the 50s when you were a preteen, but. Yeah, well, we did have computers, but they were punch card. You had to put a punch card into a big. They were as big as this room.

They were big as the pot hall. That's right, the pot hall. Yeah, that's right. So today, we're talking about, and this is inspired by us doing this podcast, actually, and really just all the work we do here at Open Studio. Yes. We titled this How to Get Good at Anything. And there's really, there's a hook to this episode.

So before we get into the hook, though, like, one of the things that I want to set up here is that, you know, with this podcast. And I'm so, again, it's amazing to be back here with you. And just thanks to all the little. for sticking with us now for going on almost three years, right? Yeah. And like, two and a half years. And you walked in and you were like, we're doing a daily podcast.

And I was like, me being agreeable, I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's great. Let's do it. If you have any fault, it's that you're agreeing for. Yeah, it's that agree too much. You're right. But, but that's what this episode is about, how to get good at anything. So since then and all the work we've done at Open Studio, one of the things that I've really noticed is that anytime Peter that you and I or anybody on our team is like I want to do this new

project it's a daily thing yeah those are always the things that succeed with us right the the daily the daily uh the daily podcast we had like the formerly daily the formerly daily podcast we got so good is formerly known as daily we got so good we only have to do it three times no but even with like you know when we were when we were kind of working on some more marketing things we were like we're going to hit this every day we're going to work on this market objective every day. Yes. When I started the guided practice session, the daily guided practice session, I'm going to do this five days a week.

I'm going to do this every weekday from my home. And something I've noticed happens when we do, and there's been several others actually. What I've noticed is you get really good at it really fast. Yes. After doing it every day for just a few weeks. Yes. You get really solid on it. Even when we did some promo things on Instagram, you did your 12 key challenge.

What else remember? I was another time. January. January. January. And in February, I did, I did my February locked hand drop two challenge. You were locked now in all of February. Dude, my drop two and locked, locked hand now is super good.

It's way better than it was before. And it's because I did it every day for 30 days. You know what I mean? Well, 28. 28, yeah. That's why I was smart of me to go. But no, so that's what this is really about. One of the most important things we can do, if you really want to get good,

one thing, I really believe now, go as granular as you can, go as specific as you. you can. Niche. And hit it for every day, make it a part of your regular routine, hit it every day for as long as you can. That's right. Like, another example is just like exercise, right? If you can hit your daily exercise routine every day instead of once a month, I can't guarantee weight loss, but I can guarantee more effective results. Ladies and gentlemen, that's a trademark. Adam just dropped a value bomb right there. That's Adam Manus's personalized workout plan. I mean, work at out every day instead of once a month. It's better. Bam. It sounds simplistic, but this is actually true, especially if you want to learn something new. So let's say you want to learn drop two voicings.

Yeah. Make it a point to do it every day for a month. See where you are. Yeah. Now, let's talk about why this is, because I think it operates on a couple of levels. Agreed. You know, there's the obvious level of if you're doing it every day as opposed to once a month, you're going to have a chance to actually get the sets and reps in that's needed. But I would say that, you know, with daily practice, and no matter what, I mean, certainly if we're talking about practicing something, but just doing anything daily, any kind of endeavor, it gives you the opportunity to combine learning something, practicing something with it becoming a habit. So when we do something every day, you good or bad, you get the kind of avalanche effect,

the snowball effect of a habit. habit as well. That's right. So yeah, if you miss a day, you're okay, don't miss two days, though. We've talked about that a lot. But this thing of like, okay, we're going to do a podcast. So we come in, whether the quality is going to be good, that's going to be up to us. And that's a whole other thing. But you're going to have more opportunity to build up the quality. So that's like a good habit. That's exactly right. By doing it, you know, every day, you're going to get those opportunities to hit those sets and reps earlier. And at the very least, after doing a podcast every day, say for a month,

you're in the habit of doing a podcast. It might not be a good podcast. You've got to work on that too, but it's a habit. You make a podcast every day. I think there's also a psychological switch that gets turned when you commit to doing something every day, right? Because then you can commit to planning to make it better.

Right? So just like with this podcast, it's like we know that we're going to be doing this podcast well into the future. So we're always thinking about are we, is it as good as it can be, you know, how can we make it better? Same thing like if I'm, you know,

I just transcribed this like Oscar Peterson locked hand thing and it was kind of an eye-opening theoretical thing that I uncovered and I was like well I need to get that of my playing right away but I'm committed to working on on that every day now right so with that commitment I know like okay I don't have to hit this all in one day right I know that I'm going to hit this this concept over the course of whatever if I do this for two months every day like I have time to get into the details of it and try to make my practice of it better. So there's something I think about committing to doing something every day that makes us get deeper into it in a way that it sticks longer. So I would say like, you know, not to overwhelm

yourself and say like, okay, well, that means I have to do voicing practice every day. And after Adam says, Adam says, I should go on my run every day. And then I said, it's not what I'm saying. I'm saying pick, mean coach Adam, mean coach Adam. No, pick the one, like make a, make a list of five things that you really want to get better at. music or not. But let's just say, for instance, five things musically that you really want to improve on. Let's say that's rhythm. Are you working on rhythm every day?

Yeah. Well, commit to working on that rhythm every day in the month of July, right? Right. Is that so hard? Probably not. It's totally doable. And you have a start and end date. And then you can like plan once you get in there and kind of plan your rhythm practice.

You can see where you are and you can develop real strategies for improvement as opposed to like, I should work on my rhythm. Well, I guess I'll work on it today. And then I'll get bored and move on tomorrow. Like realize that. coming back to this, right? So that's where real growth happens. I really believe that. Well, no, it's been proven out so many times you can see it in so many different areas, so many different fields with so many different people. And that's a great way to organically

tap into this concept of, for instance, with the podcast. Like, what makes us podcasters? Is it that we won the podcasting awards? No, because we didn't. We did apply for it, don't remember. We got a couple of votes. Your mom, my mom. No, but I mean,

that's actually not what to find. What makes us podcasters, and it's not even the millions of thousands of listeners that are out there, that's great for our ego. Hey, we're post million download, but we are post-mead. Yeah,

you're right. But even that, that's not what actually makes us podcasters. No. What makes us podcasters is we do it every day. That's true. Or we do it on a schedule. But,

I mean, we've done it every day. Like, that's when you can say, I'm a podcaster. It's not about I'm a award-winning, or I'm a great or even a bad one, but that's how you are able to say that.

So just like I'm a pianist, like for a lot of people, like for us, we've been doing this so long. That's like, that's like the one thing we know we are. We take it for granted. We're musicians.

Yeah, but we're doing it every day. We know a lot of so-called amateur, and I would caution you not to worry about, this has nothing to do with your pro or amateur. That's a false construct, actually. That's true. Yeah.

That's a fact. But like once you can, and not in a cocky, like I could be like, I am a, I am a golfer. I can say that. But I actually don't play golf.

Yeah, yeah. I kind of understand the rules I've played before, but I'm actually not a golfer because I don't, and it's not even about doing it every day. I just, I don't see myself as that. So I can't say that I am. So, but if you're playing music and you're practicing every day or close to or at least thinking about it or trying to do that or whatever, you need to start saying, I'm a musician. You know, like, and then it becomes easier.

And then the practice becomes part of the journey. It's just like running. Once you embrace it and say, I'm a runner, then you start to be able to make that turn and you do it every day or you do it on a regular schedule. Then you start to make that turn from it being like, oh, it's such a drag. You hear people talk about, I only like running like when it's finished. Well, of course. Everybody likes that. But like how do you get into the mindset of like while you're doing?

We talk about stoicism and different approaches. But it's like how do you start to embrace the actual? Because if you're a runner, you got to love running. You know, most likely there's no million dollars. there. There's no adulation. Even if you're top pro level, nobody knows great runner. But if you're a runner, you love running and you do it at every opportunity you can. I think this is one of the most important points that you hit on. And if I could just reframe it slightly, I would say that like, what this does is express your values, right? How you spend your time every day is an

expression of what you think is important. So if you are telling yourself, like, I'm a musician who thinks that groove and time is important. And yet, you never spend. spend any time working on groove and time. You are not a musician that thinks groove and time and important. If you are, if you are someone who says, I am someone who considers themselves a jazz pianist and you don't practice ever, you are not a jazz pianist. You don't spend your time doing the thing that you profess you are. You are putting the horse before the cart. And what you need to do is, I mean, maybe you are a jazz pianist. Maybe you don't want to spend your time doing that. But figure it out, figure out what it is you want to spend your time doing. If you really want to be

a musician who plays outside the changes, it's very simple. Be a musician who spends time every day playing outside the changes. That's right. And I want to make just a quick distinction of what you said. I just want to highlight a distinction. You said that it's so important. The first one when you said somebody who thinks time and groove is important, I'm a musician who thinks it's important.

You might be somebody that thinks it's important. That's very different between I'm a musician who it is important. It is important. Because of my play. Now, that doesn't mean you have perfect time. You might even be low on the spectrum. No, you don't. But you see yourself as it manifests.

That's a value that you have for yourself. It's not just an abstract value for the world. Like, I believe in truth and justice. And then you go around and committing injustice. Yeah, yeah. Well, I believe in it for everybody else. Not for me. That's not an actual value.

That's not a value. That's right. You have to express your values with your daily habits. And if you think about right now, what kind of musician. I love that, express with the daily habits. That's the actual manifestation of it. Yeah, we could talk about values all day long. But like on this podcast.

Like on this podcast. No, but, you know, if you got to, you got to practice what you preach essentially. So think right now about what kind of musician you consider yourself to be. And then look back on your practice journal. Yes. And see if that's the case. See if that matches up. Exactly.

And look, don't, and this is not about like you missed a day. Look, life is, it's hard right now. Everybody's having a lot, to varying degrees, mental health situations and issues. And like, let's be respectful of each other. And most importantly, ourselves with that. And let's deal with that in a healthy and harmonious way. I think for us, we deal with it with humor and sweeping things under the rug problems. That seems to be working for both of us.

And we're teaching our children the same. Smile. That's our form of stoicism. But no, but we want to like, this is not about beating yourself up. Oh, well, I practice 29 days and I missed a day. So I don't care about. No, no, no. But this is about making it a habit.

Don't miss two days. You know, and look, five minutes. Five minutes is better because, you know, you might think, well, Five minutes is not as good as an hour. Of course not, but it's better than missing because you're still able to say, yeah, you're not going to get that development of that extended practice, but you'll hit that the next day. But you're able to say to yourself still, I'm a, I'm a practiser.

Just like, okay, I didn't not floss totally, so I didn't lose the habit. I was a little bit tipsy, so I only got a little flossing done, but at least you're still a flosser. Yeah. You're not a great flosser, but you're a flosser. Yeah. You either are or you aren't in your mind, and that's what's important. So let's do a little, let's do, let's end this episode with a little,

intellectual exercise for this. So let's, right now, pause this podcast, go get a piece of paper and a pencil. Okay, you're back. You've got a piece of paper and pencil. Write down three things, three values about being musician that are your top three most important things about being a player. All right. I'm doing it. Don't steal mine at him. Boom, boom, boom, boom. I'm doing mine two. One more to go here. let's repeat this again. This is values that we have individually as a musician, right? Yep.

Values that are high, our top three values. Yeah. As musician. And they can be anything from broad things like, you know, scales or very minute things. There's no right or wrong answer. There's no right or wrong. Okay. Okay.

What do you got? Okay, I have number one for my, these are values for me as a musician. I'm a listener. And I mean that in the broadest sense. Like I listen and probably primarily I'm thinking I listen as I play. Listen to myself if I'm the only one playing. Listen to those who are playing with me. It doesn't mean that I'm stopping while I'm listening,

but I work on and I value the skill of being able to listen while you play. And then probably secondarily, but close and importance to listening to music, you know, keeping my ears open. That's number one. Number two is time and groove. Maybe it was on my mind because you just mentioned it. but I like to identify and tap into what the groove is,

no matter what I'm playing, no matter what style it is, even if it's out of time, whatever, but to really connect with the groove element of music. It's super important to me and always has been. And then number three, developing technique for storytelling in particular. I've always been kind of a technical player or trended that way, but at a certain point I started to try to use it not just, the value of it was not just the flashiness of it,

but it's like how can you tell a story to the listener that's interesting and edifying to them based upon the technique that you, like using technique for good, basically. So for mine, for number one, I have feel slash time. That's super important to me. Number two is harmonic sophistication. I'm a bit of a harmony nerd.

Yeah. And so I pride myself on my ability to get around and through changes, whether that's on orchestral arrangements or in the piano or whatever. And then the other thing is crossing musical barriers. And that really is more about like, you know, I like to play the guitar. I like to sing, I like to write singer-songwriter stuff that has like jazz solos.

I'd like to be genre-less a little bit. Yeah. That's part of my thing. Listeners, I hope you did your same too. Let's now review just, you don't have to write anything down, Peter. Yeah, so thinking, yeah, listening for sure. I'm so in the habit of doing that. The only thing that's been different,

a lot of playing solo piano. Yeah. So it's a different kind. It's not a different kind, it's a specific kind of listening. For sure. But I've really, but I mean, in order to develop it solo piano,

you have to be such a good listener in real time. Yeah. So that's something I've definitely been working on. Time and groove, yeah, that's definitely an area where I'm, again, I'm just in the habit of paying attention to it. And I've been kind of challenged myself to practice some things. And I definitely think about not just say if there's like a rhythm of complexity to it, but like how do you make it feel good?

Right. Within the groove. Right. That's probably the main way that's manifested it. Well, because here's the thing with you on this. I'm especially thinking as soon as I heard you say time and groove, this is cross, like time and groove for you has crossed over from values to like identity.

Like that's what you're known for. You know what I mean? So it's like that's how you identify as a musician is time and groove. So yeah, for me, feel and time is something that I've been like, you know, I spent today with the guitar and the metronome, just working on chunking away chords in a good feel. Like it's something that I spend time doing harmonic sophistication. Actually something I didn't do a lot of this week, but see, this is a good exercise to do, right? So I can see, like, I should probably make sure that I get that in to my weekly

practice. And then crossing musical barriers is something that I do on the regular, so with different instruments and singing stuff. Well, I would say for you, the harmonic thing, that also may be an area that, not to say that you don't need to practice sometimes, but you're pretty sophisticated with it. And so I do think some of these things once they become a part of your identity and you're so habitual that you're actually practicing them, even when you're not consciously working on them. Right. Which is fine. Once these values start to really ingrain, which they have with us, because we've been doing this for decades. Yeah. Like they do become just part of your identity. But I think it's, you know, this exercise for our listeners here, if you haven't taken the time to really, like,

define your values as a musician and then see if your practice routine is lining up with those values because you might be having like bebop you know and then you're not practicing any bebop for months right like and they're funny how that like this is such an obvious thing right we consider ourselves one thing but is it true in our experience day to day make it part of your day to day and it will be true that's just how it is i mean one of the silver linings of this pandemic period this pause period as we say i think has been that we've a lot of people have had the time in order to really examine what their values are like from a family standpoint I know you know having just spending a lot of time with my family a lot more you know

with my children and some of them are back that you know I've been away and I always say like I mean I value my family so much and I love them but it's like I'm actually doing all those things that we hadn't done in years like game night it's not even game night it's just like let's put a banana let's do this for sure like that's when you talk about value you talk about valuable and like the valuable times the ways that we use our time and stuff that this slowing down thing if you can gravitate towards the things that identify who you are and we got to remember as musicians when you have extra time you have to be very careful because even in terms of listening if you're only consuming content as opposed to

there's nothing wrong with consuming great content and that certainly helps you but if you want to be a musician you have to have the mentality of being a creator every day of something that's right it's just like a pod like we love podcasting and we came to this as lovers and we still both listen to a lot, but if we only listen to podcasts and we don't make a podcast every day, we can't say we're podcasts. We might know everything about podcasting.

Man, I know the best gear. No, we could say we're podcasters, but we're not in experience. We're podcasting listeners. Yeah. So, I mean, if you take away anything from this on how to get good at anything, it's really, what are you doing every day?

Yeah. And how can we align our values, the story that we tell ourselves about what kind of artists we are, what kind of person we are with our daily habits. Ooh, I just thought of a great way, a slogan for this. What? A whole new one.

What? That would apply, wouldn't it? You are a marketing genius, my friend. Okay, you know, it's funny about this too. We're just talking about, though, you know, you only listen to podcasts, but you don't make them. I'm sure you, you know, with your, when you were into the keto thing and, and the intermittent fasting. You know, I'm, and that, yeah, and I'm into the vegan plant-based thing. it's like that person, you know, you ever talk to someone, you're like, yeah, I do intermittent fasting, and they're like, oh, yeah, you know about the eight, the eight hour, the four, like, they know every detail about it. And they're like, do you do it? No, no, I don't do that, but I, you know, do you do the 20 on, four off? No, but. Well, I was going to, you know, and they can tell you everything. I did it for a day. Back in 20, 2008. Yeah. It's awesome. Don't be that guy. Don't be that guy. All right. Well, thanks, everybody. I hope you enjoyed this. I love a good. chat about, you know, life goals, man. Yeah. This is this shit right here. And then we're just saying like, so we've, we're experimenting.

I think we're still in the beta phase or experimenting. Speaking of doing something daily of pulling back to three times a week with the podcast. No, but we are doing these more long form ones where we could actually have good conversations. Exactly. We were thinking, so look, let us know, you know, you can hit us up. We have an email address, which is YHI at openstudiojazz.com. Oh, yeah. If you want to go what, what, go old school.

you can hit us up on Twitter. I am Peter Martin at I am Peter Martin on the Twitters and we can have a conversation about it and we'd love to hear if this is working for you guys. We hope that it is. We wanted to do a little bit more long form

we're starting to do one per week on YouTube which includes a lot with cameras and stuff. So we're going to continue to be here for you but just changing it up a little bit. That's right. And until next time, we...